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Monday, November 26, 2007

Detect educational plot stamped drawings with SmartPurger

SmartPurger can be used to help you detect drawings that has been created or saved by an Educational (Student and Faculty) version of AutoCAD® or AutoCAD-based software.

Why would you like to find these? PRODUCED BY AN AUTODESK EDUCATIONAL PRODUCT will be added along all four edges of any plot of these drawings. If one or more drawings with this stamp is circulating among your non educational drawings you might end up with getting more and more drawings affected. This can happen if you attach an xref or insert a drawing as block. If the xref or block has the stamp the host drawing will get it too.

A dialog box "AutoCAD Alert" shows when opening a drawing like that.

It says: "Educational plot stamp detected. If you continue with this operation, the drawing will be plotted with the following banner: "PRODUCED BY AN AUTODESK EDUCATIONAL PRODUCT" Do you want to continue?"

Learn your users or yourself to not answer Yes to the above question unless they know about the consequences.

Here is how SmartPurger can help. It's a bit semi automatic. But it can help if you want to go through thousands of drawings.

SmartPurger automatically creates a log file named SmartPurgerClosedPopUps.log in Windows temp folder. If a dialog box shows up that SmartPurger closes, it will be listed in this log file like this: 2007-11-25 15:34:34;D:\test\Educational Plot Stamped.dwg;AutoCAD Alert

Notice "AutoCAD Alert". This indicates that it could be an educational plot stamp in that drawing. If you script through 1000 drawings and find 10 with Alert you can open them manually and check if they have the Educational plot stamp or if the Alert was about something else.

Make sure to check "Close Popups Automatically" in SmartPurger>Options>Settings.

In this case you don't want SmartPurger to do anything with the drawings so make sure to just save the drawings to a temp folder that you can empty afterwards. If you have older drawings it can be a good idea to set "Convert to" as showed below.

Here is a sample DWG with the Educational plot stamp that you can try with.

UPDATE: We now have a separate application EduFinder that quickly can identify all drawings with the educational plot stamp.